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Lawrence Lessig's new book Free Culture is out now - for free as a PDF download... It will be interesting to see how this plays out for the publisher. He spoke via videolink to an audience in Brisbane last week, to launch the Australian component of the Creative Commons project. Very interesting, and one of the most inventive uses of Powerpoint I've seen so far. Lessig eloquently made the point that his free release of the book (under a CC licence, of course) alongside printed versions will work out as long as the number of new readers attracted to the printed book through the free release of the PDF outweighs the number lost through downloading the PDF. If only other content publishers could see such common (or indeed any) sense. Anyway, looking forward to seeing more of this work as the CC project continues.

Always interesting to read the meta-discussions about Kuro5hin at Kuro5hin. As a site which seems to have been developed in good part in response to perceived shortcomings at Slashdot, there's still a fair bit of debate about what this site is or should be...
Not quite sure about the title We are sheep, though.

Looks like I need to work this one into my book as well - probably in the chapter on syndication and RDFs. Not especially news-related, but I feel that many of these technologies will be increasingly interconnected as they mature... From Slashdot: PeopleAggregator - An Open Source Social Network - a story about the latest open source p2p social network engine.

I came across this through a call for papers for an online conference called Memefest - part of their approach is to invite articles inspired by a 1993 piece called "Cyberwar Is Coming". Should be interesting to see what new articles emerge from this, and the original article also seems useful.

Interesting article on Redefining Online News in the Online Journalism review...

I've added Clay Shirky's site to the newsfeeds - he's an interesting author on P2P and collaborative online publishing, and this is a good way of keeping track of what he gets up to...

Slashdot points to this article about open source and its implications: "Open Source Spreads beyond Software". Nothing much new, but a nice introduction which may make a useful undergraduate reading on the topic. I must remember to check out OhMyNews at some point, too - anyone read Korean ?

This just in - RDF and OWL Are W3C Recommendations (Slashdot). The discussion following the article contains a host of useful links for further reading, too.

My interest in this links to my research on gatewatching: increasingly we're seeing gatewatcher sites make use of RDF and semantic Web approaches to share their own content - and of course these technologies also help the process of gatewatching itself.

Starting to write lectures for the coming semester today - for my Creative Industries unit. Googling for convergence I found this OJR article which seems to do a pretty good job introducing the concepts surrounding it - of course I found this only after my unit reader went to print... Still good stuff, and I might include it in a later revision of the reader.